I am starting this because I don't see a place here in the linux section for people to show off their setups. I am personally trying to get a linux setup started on an older machine with the intent of building a new machine in the near future. I wanted to see what things all of you are doing with your setups. Make sure if you post, that you put your current specs and also pics of your setup.

Numus, Sorry, you are correct. Didn't realize that I posted in the general section. Hell anyone can post their setup here. I am just specifically looking for linux setups since that is what I will be doing.

Please don't feel like you are going in to too much detail. Curious minds want to know what makes your system tick, well at least mine does. I'm talking software and hardware. Down to the specific services you run, if you are doing an XBMC set top box style setup. Bring on the details.

Mac Mini with two video feeds to the TV, one on hdmi does XBMC the other just has the desktop. This allows me to VNC in an do stuff on the mini without disturbing XBMC. You need the latest minis for this.

The mini has optical out to a naim nVi which handles 5.1 duties except for the fronts which is handled bu unity gain on the supernait.

XBMC runs pretty much 24/7 with hitchers Aeon mods as the skin. Its all controled by a harmony 1000 remote.

-garyi
nice setup. I like the idea of the mini. How does it handle 1080p content?

-all
don't be shy. I know some of you have some nice setups. Show these things off. I'm interested to know in what ways people are using XBMC. I've seen people integrate home automation so that when the doorbell rings a camera takes a picture of the front door area and sends it all to the GUI of XBMC with the pic and a message saying someone is at the front door. Are there any of you all doing unique things like this for your personal use? I look forward to see these setups.

Hi Kee, I only have a couple of, erm, obtain 1080 films and the play fine. I don't know though if I am sensetive or if there is an issue, but I feel a little bit sea sick when watching them! Seriously.

Have since moved sunfire 11" next to the speaker in the pic, and ditched the Dish network box for a zotac ion w/1gb ram running xbmc off a 2gb usb flash drive. Haven't fixed resolution issues yet, but plays 720p fine so far.

1 cpu/gpu fan in the htpc, but fishtank near the setup is way louder than the fan so whatevs.

edit: htpc is on gigabit network, with content on a ubuntu 9.10 system with 3 2tb drives.

An ASRock ION 330 with xbmclive 9.11beta2 configured with sabnzbd+ to handle all my downloading needs feeding my Samsung UE46B7070 over hdmi.
Audio goes via optical to the HK AVR155.
The Playstation only goes on when its time for guitar hero nowadays.

To store my files currently i have a Popcorn Hour A-110 in the bedroom with internal 500gig + external 1TB and another external 500gig, everything is on those disks streamed over the cat3 network, via an old Netgear Rangemax WPN824v2 router.

And of course now when we finally got linux drivers for the internal ASRock IR.. A Logitech Harmony 1100 makes my place in the sofa feel extra comfortable.

For those times i need to type I have a wireless logitech dinovo keyboard attached.

^^Forgive me but We can't have this kind of thing being spread across the internet. Next thing you know Everyone will be forking out double per cd for black ones.

designgears Wrote:All wrong... try this...

Take one of your cd's, get a black permanent marker and blacken the center clear ring. Even better, go get some black CD-R's and copy a cd to it. You will notice a pretty substantial change in the sound quality when played back on a cd player.

You are talking about a digital media format. It's not analog. There's no grey fuzzy area. Either the bit has been set, or the bit has not been set. That's like saying if you flip your light switch too slow it's going to be 1/2 light in your place. It's not analog, it's digital. It's either there, or it's not.

After looking at this picture I realize it is time to get new furnature, and make my girlfriend not take my camera when she goes on vacations.

The cool thing about this Mainboard is that it comes with an external Notebook Power Supply so there is not as much Power going into heat as it has a higher efficiency with its 80Watts than normal PC PSUs.

The USB Stick is the only Drive i have in this box. I wrote the newest XBMC 9.11 Live CD on the USB Stick and run XBMC from that.

For Audio Quality I can only say that if you have a FLAC CD RIP transmitted via optical TOS Link to a AV Receiver there should be no loss in Audio Quality.
As for the people that do not transmit their sound digital but use analog 5.1 connection instead i would recommend a really good soundcard. Not those cheap onboard realtek chips. There are major differences in soundquality there!